Whirlpools
2 Audio Speakers, Paper, Ink, Wood
28 x 20 x 10 cm / 11 x 8 x 4 inch (each one)
2013
"And sometimes I compare myself in my thoughts with Crassus, the orator. The story is that he grew so inordinately fond of a tame eel, a dull, mute, red-eyed fish in his ornamental pond, that it became the talk of the town; and when Domitius disparaged him in the Senate for shedding tears over the death of this fish, wishing to portray him as something of a fool, Crassus replied: "When my fish died, I did what you did not when your first wife died, or your second." I do not know how often this Crassus with his eel has hurtled across the centuries into my mind as a reflection of my self. His response to Domitius is not the reason, however. That brought the ones who laughed onto his side, so that the substance of the thing was diffused into a witticism. But that substance is what cuts me to the quick, and it would have been no different even if Domitius had wept bitterly and with the most sincere distress over his wives. There would still have been Crassus, crying over his eel. And an inexpressible something forces me to think about this figure-whose ludicrousness and contemptibility I see so perfectly in the middle of a Senate running the world and discussing deadly serious business in a way that seems completely foolish to me as soon as I try to express it in words. The image of Crassus is sometimes in my brain at night, like a splinter with everything around it a throbbing, infection. Then it is as if I myself were beginning to ferment, to foam, seethe, and give off sparks. And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more direct, fluid, and passionate than words. It has whirlpools too, but ones which seem to lead not into the abyss as whirlpools of language do but into myself in some way, and into the lap of the most profound peace."
